[plug] autofs compared to smbmount

[Ryan]

On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 11:28, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> autofs is a way of automatically mounting shares (be they SMB, nfs, or
> local devices) upon demand. There's a bit of configuration to it, but
> it means that instead of having to run mount (or smbmount), you can
> just cd directly to a specially formatted path. eg;
>    cd /auto/smb/foopc/share
> 
> autofs is great - but can be a pain to set up well. ^_^

Also a pain in another way ...

If I've been at work with my laptop and mounted up one of the main
network drives (smbfs in this case) with autofs and saved attachments in
Evolution to it, played the odd ogg with XMMS from it etc.  then I go
home and try to do the same, naturally it will try to go directly to the
autofs mount point from these respective applications and hang.  I have
to kill the autofs process and it recovers gracefully, but it will hang
indefinitely if I don't.

Anyone know a fix - other than changing my mounting practises? :)

Some "I can't find the share, I'll do something constructive now like
give up" smarts would be good - involving a configurable timeout etc ..
or do I just write some dodgy wrapper around it to monitor the process?
:P

Ryan